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Kelsier: What should we do? How do we make money cleanly? Is it even possible? I think every crypto project, whether it’s VC backed or a memecoin, is value extractive. Coffeezilla: Hang on, I think there’s a difference between a utility, something that does something, a tool that purports to do something, and things that literally have no intrinsic value at all. Kelsier: But it’s still value extractive, it doesn’t matter if it has utility. Coffeezilla: Not exactly. Take for example the company Coca Cola, they’re making a lot of money, but they also actually provide a good, and then, in addition, they provide dividends for their shareholders. So it’s not a zero sum game. Apple is not a zero sum game. These companies are producing things. That is what the value is based on. Crypto, I think the idea is that you should value it because there’s some sort of financial technology behind it, I think that’s the overall pitch. Kelsier: But there’s not. There’s not. I mean look at any crypto asset, even bitcoin. Bitcoin is literally valuable because a shit load of people said it’s valuable. And because it "isn’t controlled by anyone that we know of". Even at the top it’s a zero sum game, it’s extractive, to some degree. None of it has value.

YouTube video, “the LIBRA interview”, February 17, 2025

Tunez (evm/acc), @cryptunez there’s a certain type of mid-curve crypto archetype who thinks they’re in this elite 0.1% of participants who’ve “figured out” crypto is inherently worthless it’s a toxic mindset that brings cognitive dissonance as you are forced to reject all evidence of innovation

X post, February 20, 2025

Although this is by no means confined to the practice and discourse of the ‘Web3 space’, we’ve noted how salient cultural forms associated with, and shaped by, this productive activity bear giddily ambiguous promises: a disruption that perpetuates and perfects the capitalist mode of production; pragmatic techno-solutionism rendering extant political mechanisms obsolete; and delivering us from ideology, all-encompassing commodification. Sure enough, there’s nothing logical to this juxtaposition of contrary accounts. Nor is there seamless morphing between the oneiric scheme of prefigurative work (“building the future in some form or fashion”) and productive activity itself – the all-in fabrication of ‘texts’ in various shapes: white papers and pitch decks, frantic chatter, fusillades of fucks, pseudo theoretical treatise, terms of service, statements of affairs and severance agreements, a nod’s as good as a wink and plenty of interface, code and protocol – and never-ending streams of mercurial numerals… The power of these contrary forms, their potential effectivity, lies in their ability to integrate ever greater swathes of real human activity into the general process of exchange value generation – an evolution which, once again, cannot be imputed solely to the application of blockchain technology or ‘tokenomics’ given their current embryonic implementation. In this respect, Web3 might best be understood as contributing to an ambitious experiment in socio-economic engineering, and I will argue that one way it does this is precisely through the activation and dissemination of ideologisation processes – not only among its core architects and promoters, nor merely the users of its protocols, but ultimately across expanding networks of human and non-human agents.

Bear with me whilst I drum this in: ideologisation is never simply the phenomenon of choosing, or ‘ending up’, on one side or the other of a political spectrum. It is the process by which humans, departing from the material relations of production that they take part in, elaborate an ‘understanding’ (a false consciousness, you might say) of their own past experience, position, prospects and surroundings; this is a dynamic process insofar as it relies on, and activates, manifold degrees of mediation between the very basic level of agents cooperating and competing inexorably to ensure their material sustenance, and the equally contested and collective process of elaborating (more or less) durable cultural forms, which constitute highly significant objects – not primarily due to their superficial (indeed, formal) qualities, but because ‘retroactively’ they may shape, to some extent, the social structures and aforementioned material relations. In this sense, we could say that ideologisation always departs from the material realm (one which, as yet, is fundamentally characterised by commodity exchange) and circles back to it, but like an echo. There is indeed a reciprocity of mediations that analysis must account for; in this respect, mental health ‘challenges’ – or bluntly put, self-harming practices – can be interpreted as an attempt at ‘feedback loop’ mediations, facets of the ideologisation process that are wholly inconclusive with regard to altering the actual relations of production that agents engage in, whereas ‘strong’ coping mechanisms (Karatzogianni, Matthews, Vachet, op. cit.) such as contributing to the implementation of ‘Web2.5’ are more operative. The conception and promotion of blockchain-enabled intermediation services that organise audience labour (for instance QR-code scanning applications at cultural events) can be understood as considerably more effective forms of ‘ideological’ production. Put another way, although morning meditation and gym sessions, or daily drug use and bouts of clinical depression, are generally not referenced as instances of ‘ideological’ production, these practices do sustain the more or less (falsely) conscious ‘understandings’ that humans develop of their past experience, position, prospects and surroundings, and in turn contribute to broader, collective, cultural forms.

Consider the ‘cognitive dissonance’ Tunez refers to in the epigraph above; it too would admittedly constitute just a fragment of a process of ideologisation. However strongly Web3 players might claim that their activity transcends ideology, the terms used by Tunez and by Coffeezilla to deny Kelsier’s suggestion that “crypto is inherently worthless” are telling: it’s worth derives from ‘innovation’ on the one hand, ‘financial technology’ on the other. (For the anecdote, Kelsier aka Hayden Davis played an instrumental role in the 2025 $LIBRA cryptocurrency scandal, in which Argentinian President Javier Milei became embroiled). Acknowledging “evidence” of crypto’s disruptive power, “preferring the idea (…) that you should value it” would clearly be accepted by most observers as rhetorical devices in an ‘ideologically’ (and politically) charged debate. These prolepses aim to steer an audience of X followers and YouTube viewers away from Kelsier’s “toxic mindset”; indeed, as with many elements of Web3 discourse, they feed into broader cultural forms articulating techno-solutionism, enrichment and disruption – what Coffeezilla quaintly names “the overall pitch”. However, it would be premature – even somewhat facile – to settle for a purely descriptive assertion of their ‘ideological’ nature without further interrogating the various tiers of mediation between these discursive elements – the ‘values’ that players ascribe to crypto and adhere to – and the valorisation processes embedded within contemporary capitalist production. What exactly are blockchain agitators talking about when they use the term ‘value(s)’? Where do existing conceptualisations of this term occur among the production of cultural forms that Web3 players take part in, and act by? To answer these questions, and begin resolving the greater question of how the concepts of ‘value’ and ‘ideology’ might be critically and effectively used, we must further unpack some of the foundational theoretical work surrounding them.

Let’s begin though with three short exerts from our interviews with players based in North American cities – the first, cofounder of an NFT marketing platform; the second and third, two young entrepreneurs passionate about using blockchains for music distribution. We’ll return to these expressions and dissect several more, as we journey through a series of theoretical propositions, as many ‘performances’ of value that must be examined and critiqued. At first glance, though, there’s no escaping the confusion in their expressions:

“I think for us it’s just about trusting that we’re delivering value to people. And the more that we stay persistent in that and try and put ourselves out there and I mean, we’re making obviously YouTubes and social media posts and all those things, and partnerships, that will help with going to market. But I think with business – and this is blockchain or any other kind of business – if you deliver value for customers and you do a good job telling that story, eventually people will onboard.” (i18)

“In that context I was referring to the business, the financial value. But I think it’s very true to say the other one too, that we’re exchanging values. The two are very alike, especially in the last cycle [of his musical production project], I would say, where there’s so much exuberance and excitement and it self-selects a specific type of person (...); they’re very value centric. People are here, because they care a lot about decentralization or they care a lot about the empowerment of artists. And I think once we all show up here, we start to like knock these values around, and I think it's actually made them more exponentially important.” (i11)

“We build on Ethereum because we align deeply with the values of Ethereum as a technology stack, and we see what it can do: this idea of, like, every song having a wallet address attached to it, which means that at the song level, you have a means of value exchange with that artist in a way that doesn’t involve any intermediaries. It’s something that we really value and see the potential in the long term, regardless of what the exact value model is long term.” (i28)

Several colleagues have enthusiastically told me that the anthropologist David Graeber had planned to write about blockchain technology before his untimely death in 2020. Although this may be a lazy chatbot-fabricated rumour, he would probably have had a field-day. His 2001 study subtitled The False Coin of Our Own Dreams is a painless place to begin tracking down those performances of value. Graeber starts by identifying “three large streams of thought that converge in the present term” (Graeber, op. cit.: 1): first comes the sociological acceptation of “conceptions of what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life”; then he characterises an “economic sense” based on the possibility of measuring the desirability of an object or determining a degree of substance that might be surrendered in order to acquire a degree of another substance. Thirdly, he specifies the linguistic conception of value as “meaningful difference”. Interestingly, a fourth performance finds no stage in Graeber’s book: use-value¹, or the idea that the value of an object might first and foremost be provided by its utility for human beings (or other life-forms, for that matter).

Let’s start with the third one – and see how soon its operation leads us back to the first two. Take for instance the conclusions of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: making apparent is what confers value. She bases this on her study of Melanesians, who do not view humans as an individuals, but as multiple beings whose changing ‘meanings’ are ascribed by the visions of others. Value here is clearly signification, and valuing any object in such a way means defining it within a broad system of importances. Bring on the Mark Fisher: “Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that it does. (…) [Any] particular linguistic term gains its meaning not from its own positive qualities but from its difference from other terms” (Fisher, 2014: 17-18). Soit! Now rewind to the work of anthropologist Louis Dumont, who followed the insights that Karl Polanyi laid out in The Great Transformation. He teaches us that individuation made possible the emergence of ‘the economy’, where each individual represents – and is represented as – a value in itself; Dumont went on to claim that in Western society, the individual is the supreme value (Graeber, op. cit.: 17). Unique individuality leads us on to the notion of the immortal soul², which is by definition incomparable, escaping the principle of identity (where one object is identical, or equal, to another). The notion that value derives from individuation (and again, that “other terms” afford “difference” to unicity) is completed by Graeber’s recall that the ‘prestige’ associated with individual property is always the ability to exclude others from using what is yours – and his insight that this exclusionary drive is precisely what the “economic sense” of the term value performs:

“Prestige is not an object that one can dispose of as one will, or even, really, consume; it is rather an attitude that exists in the minds of other people. It can exist only within a web of social relations. Of course, one might argue that property is a social relation as well, reified in exactly the same way: when one buys a car one is not really purchasing the right to use it so much as the right to prevent others from using it – or, to be even more precise, one is purchasing their recognition that one has a right to do so. But since it is so diffuse a social relation – a contract, in effect, between the owner and everyone else in the entire world – it is easy to think of it as a thing. In other words, the way economists talk about ‘goods and services’ already involves reducing what are really social relations to objects; an economistic approach to values extends the same process even further, to just about everything. (…) What economic theory ultimately tries to do is to explain all human behavior (…) on the basis of a certain notion of desire, which then in turn is premised on a certain notion of pleasure. People try to obtain things because those things will make them happy or gratify them in some way (or at least because they think they will). (...) It is this promise of pleasure economists call ‘value’.” (Ibid.: 9 – I highlight the drive in italic.)

It’s tempting to go one step further: what Graeber refers to as the sociological conception of value essentially performs, likewise, a shared representation of objects that humans ought to desire. Admittedly these objects may comprise abstract collective beliefs, political goals or divine-inspired conduct, but practical illustrations often boil down to material ‘things’ that can be exchanged and acquired, for usage, or to prevent others from using them. Enter anthropologists – Clyde Kluckhohn, for whom value is... a representation of the desirable (Ibid.: 4); Annette Weiner, creatively setting up value as “the reflection of the degree of fear one has of losing an object” (Ibid.: 45); Arjun Appadurai, teaching us that value essentially springs from exchange, and from how much the buyer desires (Ibid.: 34); and Igor Kopytoff distinguishing between more or less commensurable values of objects (Ibid.: 32) – i.e. objects that might be ‘protected’ from markets, or ascribed monetary value in more or less reluctant or downright devious ways. David Graeber implicitly points to common sources of these variations, among the founding fathers of European sociology. Firstly:

“Value, according to Simmel, is not rooted in human labor, nor does its existence depend on any larger social system. It arises from exchange. Hence, it is purely an effect of individual desire. The value of an object is the degree to which a buyer wants it. It is measured by how much that person is willing to give up in order to get it.” (Ibid.: 31)

Secondly, although somewhat sidelined, Emile Durkheim’s conception of economic institutions is referred to as “a means of social integration – one of the ways society creates a network of moral ties between what would otherwise be a chaotic mass of individuals – or, if not that, then at least the means by which ‘society’ allocates resources” (Ibid.: 12). This is precisely the function of value that Arnaud Esquerre and Luc Boltanski point to in their work Enrichissement, reminding us how, in Durkheim’s sociology, the valuation of objects stems from collective ideals – hence judgements of value: the soldier dies for the flag, which really is just a bit of fabric (Boltanski & Esquerre, op. cit.: 131). Moreover, that very process of resource allocation, which implies common elaboration of ‘reflections of degrees of fear’ or ‘representations of the desirable’, is evidently performed through a process of differentiation and signification. As Boltanski and Esquerre quaintly put it, we’re not just talking about a timepiece – it’s “the old watch at the back of the drawer” or “the superb watch of such and such brand”: “value always has a fictional character” (Ibid.: 141). So, is the circle thus complete – are we back where we started with the linguistic conception of value as “meaningful difference”? Allow me to point out, for the time being, that if value always has a fictional character, then it is also always potentially a falsehood, a lie. And if being a fiction is indeed the predominant characteristic of what humans name the ‘value’ of an object, perhaps there is an even deeper fiction in the widely shared notion that an object’s value is essentially related to the practical use it might have for humans – a notion that is implicit with all the desire-based conceptions, and which we encounter all the way down to the distinction that Marxist thought makes between use value and exchange value. I will begin to argue that the symbolic and differentiating facets of the notion, on the one hand, and its normative or moral dimension (what to collectively aspire to, as good) on the other hand, are also best understood as secondary phenomena, with regard to value as an instrument of measure, a means of allocating resources and reducing what are really social relations to quantifiable objects – to recycle David Graeber’s words. Before I pursue in that direction, let’s briefly turn back to those three blockchain entrepreneurs and the ways in which they used the term.

For interviewee number 18, delivering value to people, and doing a good job at telling that story, helps going to market and making people onboard: we observe, first of all, a confusion between a value founded on utility, and one based on the symbolic realm of story-telling (and thus potentially between a real experience and a bit of ‘let’s pretend’); moreover, we must note that this confusion itself is placed under the auspices of valuation on a market and the transformation of users into consumers and producers of exchange value. For interviewee 11, the process of exchanging financial values in the form of an NFT-based allocation of property rights to produced music, and the process of exchanging moral values of empowerment and decentralisation, happen to also be “very alike”, and when you “knock those values around” it increases them. Belief in empowerment or in decentralisation can come in different forms – or with various qualities – but they ultimately cannot be quantified, other than to state somewhat absurdly that my belief in decentralisation has increased from a score of 7/10 to a score of 9/10, or to claim that 2024 saw a 23.6% increase in the overall belief in empowerment of the population of Buffalo County, South Dakota. The tangible increase that this founder eagerly refers to is that of a quantity of ETH, or that of the exchange rate of US$/ETH – as in this particular case, that was the standard currency that the project used and produced. The music distribution system developed by interviewee 28 also uses this crypto and its technological stack: adhering to “the values of Ethereum” as a technology implies that any song distributed via his platform has a wallet address associated with it and therefore allows direct crypto exchanges between artists and fans. Although the platform’s business model is unclear, this is something he values. Let’s rephrase that: although he doesn’t know quite how or even if this music distribution mechanism will produce significant quantities of exchange value, it is something it should inherently do, as monetary exchange is technologically embedded within the system itself, and this is to be cherished. It would no doubt be an exaggeration, at this point, to suggest that Web3 players live for the accumulation of crypto, something wholly abstract, which cannot even be rubbed and fondled, unlike the pieces of paper or metal alloy that a money collector adores.

In his own probings of the meaning of value, David Graeber inevitably comes round to Karl Marx, and the latter’s definition of value as a proportion of the total quantity of labour necessary for a given society to operate. He also addresses the well-known problem of all those forms of labour that cannot be (easily) quantified: house-keeping, political action, personal projects, leisure time (and audience labour, one might add, although this isn’t Graeber’s beef). He rightly points out Marx’s contribution, theorising money as abstraction, a means of exchange, and as as value per se, the ultimate goal to be achieved in a capitalist system (Graeber, op. cit.: 114-115). For Marx, the abstractness of value always transmits itself to labour and finds its real meaning in abstract human labour as the economic substance of value³. Both mystifying and paradoxically enlightening, money supposedly allows the worker to gain a sense of the importance of her/his own action, creativity, his/her ability to change the world:

“Money has meaning for the actors (...) because it sums up their intentions (or, the importance of their intentional actions, which comes down to pretty much the same thing). However, it can do so only by integrating them into a contrastive totality, the market, since it is only by means of money that my individual actions and capacities become integrated as a proportion of the totality of everyone’s (...).” (Ibid.: 67)

Here, Graeber notes the Hegelian influence on Marxist analysis: any action or process only makes sense when it is integrated into a wider, total system; here labour and appraisal of its value make sense when integrated into “the market”. Money, he therefore argues is what represents, it is a signifier – here redoubling Strathern’s claim that making visible is what confers value. Yet, as he clarifies, money is always an abstract representation; economic value and ideological or symbolic value are united in money, insofar as it makes fluid and multiple qualities into a fixed, individual quantity. Graeber recalls the debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides, the first claiming that objects are always in movement, the second that there are static objects. He predictably sides with Heraclitus, adding that if all objects are in constant movement, a measure is not possible other than in abstraction; yet the mental construction of the object is tied to the moment, which no longer is as soon as this representation is voiced or annotated (Ibid.: 50-51). We might recall at this point these well-known lines from the first chapter of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment:

“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002 / 1944: 4-5).

Graeber adds: “Once one is accustomed to a basic apparatus for looking at the world that starts from an imaginary, static, Parmenidean world outside of it, connecting the two becomes an overwhelming problem” (Graeber, op. cit.: 51) – quite a problem indeed, unless one submits wholeheartedly (or perhaps even with some resignation) to the primacy of commodity’s abstract realm. In this regard, embracing the wholly fetishised ‘metaverse’ of crypto exchange may be seen as a false solution to this real quandary, an ultimate leap into the unknowable! These epistemological reminders gain significance as Graeber points to the fact that there is no symbolic value that is not materially based (a premise which we encountered earlier, with Raymond Williams):

“(…) it quickly becomes obvious that just as much as the production of food requires thinking, art and literature are really a set of material processes. Literature, from this kind of materialist perspective, would no longer be so much about ‘texts’ (usually thought of as abstractions that can then seem to float apart from time or space) but about the writing and reading of them. This is obviously in every way material: actual, flesh-and-blood people have to write them, they have to have the leisure and resources, they need pens or typewriters or computers, there are practical constraints of every sort entailed in the circulation of literature, and so on.”⁴ (Ibid.: 54).

Thus, posing the very fact that abstraction cannot evade material reality, Graeber comes round to some important questions, which undeniably lead us back to the notion of ideologisation and its intrinsic drive to transform things and human experiences into value:

“So in what way do the actions of shaping people become embodied in value-forms, that is, forms that reflect the meaning of my actions to myself in some tangible form as some object or action that I desire? And in what way does this process allow for fetishism – to people failing to recognize the degree to which they themselves are producing value – and for exploitation – a means by which some people appropriate the surplus value generated by others?” (Ibid.: 69).

Before we attempt to provide some answers of our own to these important questions, let’s see what David Graeber means when, just after these, he refers to the work of Jane Fajans, stating: “value is inherently contrastive; thus it can only be made into a reality (‘realized’) in a relatively public context, as part of some larger social whole”(Ibid: 70). In the context of our research on Web3 players, this assumption is verified; as I’ve already noted, crypto collectors subtract money away from circulation and social exchange, establishing a secretive relationship with the sums they possess. They hide their wealth in private wallets, operating pseudonymously on-line, but all their transactions are universally visible. In a sense, tokens are hidden to be seen, with flashy NFTs as prestigious cherries on the cake, tips of the icebergs of each individual’s wealth, each individual’s own value. Remember the young folk who dabble in crypto, how they may wander down the streets in a daze of angst and jouissance, able to feel doubly disconnected from the real material world that they are walking on: they share with other humans the hard surface that their select sneakers are touching, ear-pods extracted they may share sounds at intervals with other similar folks; yet they saunter along that track with the full knowledge that most of the people they cross know nothing of that swarming mental hive; they are there, but also all the time elsewhere, in that other dimension, which indeed resembles the reclusive realms of model train enthusiasts or canary breeders, but isn’t this a rather more grotesque and pretentious dimension – one infused by the cryptic knowledge of life beyond death, that distant promise lurking in Nakamoto’s white paper, of a currency that will not lose value over time, an antidote to decay? Ah, let’s not get ahead of ourselves; the “larger whole” that David Graeber is referring to can broadly be understood as an arrangement of transient life-forms interacting, among themselves and the finite material resources at their disposal – or, to use a somewhat older and admittedly incomplete way of saying the same thing, a form of extended social relationship. Whether or not this form or arrangement might inherently tend towards εὐδαιμονία as in Aristotle’s idealistic vision of politics, remains a matter of conjecture – although it would appear to be this understanding of the notion that Graeber has in mind when he recalls, with Terence Turner, that “the ultimate stakes of politics is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is” (Ibid.: 115). I would suggest that there is a kernel of truth in that (and I might gladly come back to this point), albeit in a somewhat less optimistic vein that the one adopted by the two anthropologists – and that subsequently leads Graeber to claim that “politics is about the meaning of life”. (

“Insofar as historical materialism is materialist, it is based upon the postulates that Williams outlines. But insofar as it is historical, it is concerned to analyse the specific and shifting modes of this fundamental material relation, all of which are forms of that relation. In particular, it is postulated that any form of extended social relationship depends upon the extraction and distribution of material surplus and the means by which this is achieved is thus the central determining characteristic of any social formation. Such modes of social production and exchange are cultural, hence the very real problem of making a society/culture differentiation without narrowing the definition of culture to include only those elements of social interaction which involve a secondary level of abstraction, namely the representation of concrete, material relations in symbolic forms. Thus we must distinguish two types of form, a social form which is a series of material relations that, insofar as they operate unconsciously, can be abstractly analysed and determined with the precision of natural science, and a cultural form which, while it entails a material support, is not itself material and which has an essentially mediated relationship with the material reality it represents. Indeed, there is an essential divide between these distinct formal realms, the existence of which allows ideology to enter, because it allows denial and the lie, both of which depend upon a relationship which is not determinant. However, this autonomy is bought at the cost of a loss of real or material effectivity. Cultural forms only become effective when they are translated into social forms which do have material effectivity. Thus there is a constant dialectic at the cultural level between autonomy and effectivity and it is at the level of social effectivity that material production is ultimately determinant. However, to return to the level of social forms, the economic is a specific historical form of the social relations of production and distribution. It is the form these relations take in a social formation within which commodity exchange is dominant. Thus, it is possible to argue that the economic is superstructural in relation to the material base or structure, that it could in fact be seen as the dominant level of the superstructure. For what Marx argues in Capital is that the real historical transition to capitalism involves a move from a system of social relations and domination based upon the direct physical control of landed property and people to one based upon the increasingly indirect control through commodity exchange and, in particular, through the exchange of the commodity of labour power, and that this real historical process is a real process of social abstraction which thus requires appropriate theoretical abstraction for its analysis. It is because the economic is the most abstract and fundamental form of the social relation within capitalism that it is primary both theoretically and actually, but as a historically specific representation of a predeterminate material relationship. It is the real existence of this abstract economic level of extended commodity production that allows for the development of an increasing division of labour and thus for the development of the specific superstructural forms of capitalism. Thus the relative autonomy of the superstructure is a real and increasingly central characteristic of capitalism, but it is itself determined at the level of the economic and ultimately it is a form, at two levels of mediation, of a material relation which also remains determinant in and through the economic.”

Without this analysis of the real existence of this abstract economic level of extended commodity production, one remains capable of producing merely nonsensical affirmations such as: “So, why is a virtual thing like a cryptocurrency actually worth anything? No simple reason supplies the answer because the ontology of money is undefined, value is fugitive, price is complex and intractable, and ultimately, cryptocurrencies – in particular – do not follow common-sense explanations.” (DuPont, op. cit.: 76). But with this analysis, we may begin to close a number of gaps.

Firstly, take note of Garnham’s distinction between social forms of material relations of production, which operate unconsciously (or, in other words, without the necessity of any consciously elaborated intellectual or ‘ideological’ back-up), and cultural forms that have “an essentially mediated relationship with the material reality [they represent]” (or, in other words, that afford or require more or less conscious and elaborate ‘ideological’ production). Secondly, take stock of Garnham’s explanation of “the economic” as the most abstract and fundamental form of the social relation within capitalism” and, moreover, how it may be grasped theoretically “as a historically specific representation of a predeterminate material relationship”⁶. In other words, the economic is a form of extended social relationship (or of material relations of production) concomitant with control through commodity exchange. This basic fact is precisely overlooked, clouded by the wholly abstract usage of the term ‘economy’ which prevails today and obscures its own origin in Xenophon’s Οἰκονομικός – a treatise on wealth creation via the efficient management of slave labour and outsourcing of domestic management to women. As Eric Hazan and Kamo candidly recall:

“Originally the science of the wealth of sovereigns and then of nations, economics is thus fundamentally the science of controlling slaves, the science of enslavement. This is why its primary tool is measurement, of which commodity value is merely the means. One must measure in order to control, because the master must be able to devote himself entirely to politics. From its origins, economics has organised servitude in such a way that the production of slaves is measurable.” (Hazan & Kamo, 2013: 47)

In light of this, it’s now possible to reconsider the different conceptions of value that David Graeber isolated and to ascertain how ‘economic’ value lies in an entirely different realm, on a distinct level to the others, and how it essentially annuls the qualitative performances of purpose, meaningful differentiation, and collective definition of goodness, or desirability. As I hinted earlier, the inherently fictional character of ‘economic’ value is tied to the fundamental falsehood that an instrument of measure designed to reduce social relations to quantifiable objects (and thus allocate resources on an exclusionary and dominative basis) might actually have practical use for humans, or other life-forms, at large.

In sum, Garnham reminds us of the fact that cultural forms are always determined by social forms: the scarcity of resources firstly determines, at a material level, what life-forms might then choose to produce or enhance, with ‘arbitration’ necessarily related to the mode of production. Moreover ‘the economic’ can be analysed as the fundamental abstract form – one which then allows “the master (…) to devote himself entirely to politics”, or in other words, which both underlies and infuses the production of the multifarious cultural forms that are commonly named ideologies at present. Cultural forms, incorporating ever more varied types of human and nonhuman production⁷, are always marked by these factors, more or less unwittingly, to the extent that they may appear to humans as ‘natural’ or ‘fair’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘free’. This analysis nevertheless leaves room for a number of questions, notably regarding the material and historical process from which such an ‘arrangement’ arose. Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work offers some challenging lines of response, deriving from the premise of “a lack of a theory of intellectual and manual labour, of their historical division and the conditions for their possible reunification” (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 3). The following exerts from the introduction of Intellectual and Manual Labour help to grasp the general theoretical framework within which he develops his analysis of the emergence of ‘exchange abstraction’ and – as we saw earlier – the objectification of Warenform (commodity form) into *Denkform (thought form):

“In the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ Marx makes reference to this antithesis that a ‘higher phase of communist society’ becomes possible only ‘after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished’. But before understanding how this antithesis can be removed it is necessary to understand why it arose in the first place. (…) As social forms develop and change, so also does the synthesis which holds together the multiplicity of links operating between men according to the division of labour. Every society made up of a plurality of individuals is a network coming into effect through their actions. How they act is of primary importance for the social network; what they think is of secondary importance. Their activities must interrelate in order to fit into a society, and must contain at least a minimum of uniformity if the society is to function as a whole. This coherence can be conscious or unconscious but exist it must – otherwise society would cease to be viable and the individuals would come to grief as a result of their multiple dependencies upon one another. Expressed in very general terms this is a precondition for the survival of every kind of society; it formulates what I term ‘social synthesis’. (…) My investigation is in strict keeping with the Marxian outline. But, while in that outline the reference is to ‘the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical – in short, ideological forms’ in which men become conscious of their social conflicts and fight them out, my preoccupation is with the conceptual foundations of the cognitive faculty vis-a-vis nature which in one form or another is characteristic of the ages of commodity production from their beginnings in ancient Greece to the present day. (...) In societies based on commodity production the social synthesis is centred on the functions of money as the ‘universal equivalent’, to use Marx’s expression. In this capacity money must be vested with an abstractness of the highest level to enable it to serve as the equivalent to every kind of commodity that may appear on the market. This abstractness of money does not appear as such and cannot be expected to ‘appear’ as it consists of nothing but form – pure abstract form arising from the disregard of the use-value of the commodities operated by the act of exchange equating the commodities as values. That which constitutes the appearance of money is its material, its shape and size, and the symbols stamped on it; in short, all that makes money into a thing that can be carried about, spent and received. But that which makes this thing ‘money’ in the sense of value and of equivalence is of a quality radically different from all the properties that can be seen or felt or counted or otherwise perceived. The human labour that has gone into the production of the thing serving as money and into the commodities it serves to exchange determines the magnitude of their value, the proportion in which they are exchanged. But to be labour products is not a property which accrues to the commodities and to money in the relationship of exchange where the abstraction arises. The abstraction does not spring from labour but from exchange as a particular mode of social interrelationship, and it is through exchange that the abstraction imparts itself to labour, making it ‘abstract human labour’. The money abstraction can be more properly termed ‘the exchange abstraction’. (

Arguably, if we return briefly to the object of this study, several points of friction appear with regard to this theoretical framework. Firstly, Sohn-Rethel points out that Marx explicitly wrote that “value abstraction never assumes a representation as such, since the only expression it ever finds is the equation of one commodity with the use-value of another” (Ibid.: 33-34) and he therefore suggests that the metal alloy which gives money its tangible and visible body is merely a metaphor of the value abstraction it embodies, not this abstraction itself. One might argue that abstractions can precisely be understood as expressions and representations, and we have now seen for well over six decades that money doesn’t need to be minted into a palpable matter to be worshipped, and that numbers on a computer screen can provide just as firm a metaphor⁸ of value abstraction. Secondly, he refers to the concept of property as “a conceptualisation of the factual necessity of keeping use and exchange separated”, claiming that “the need to exempt from use objects entered for exchange is a simple fact of experience; if it is ignored exchange must cease”. (Ibid.: 40) Indeed, in a pre-digital world, use and exchange are contrasting and empirically distinct, given that it is not possible to use a thing during the – suspended – time of exchange, nor obviously after having exchanged that thing (for another thing). This is however no longer the case with digital objects and one might argue, moreover, that despite being entered for exchange, objects such as financial assets that are placed in a liquidity pool for instance, may continue to provide the crypto trader with some form of jouissance throughout the moment of exchange itself. Lastly, consider how the “general law of property” which he describes might relate to specific characteristics of Web3 ‘communities’ that I evoked in part one:

“Because the content of the experience is a negation there arises from it a prohibition of use which extends to everyone involved in the transactions and becomes the norm for all other similar instances. Only by coming into touch with the practice of exchange does the fact of possession assume the meaning of a general law of property. Exchange has this consequence because it is a relationship between human beings. They cannot relate to each other as they do to nature, for instance killing and robbing each other as they do to animals. Instead they must speak to each other, communicate by signs, or in any case recognise each other as human beings. This, too, is still a simple fact but one that gives rise to norms, because it breaks through the basic relation with nature, replacing it with a social relation between groups.” (Ibid.)

Indeed, veneration of exchange binds the false community. Web3 intensifies the law of property to a level thus far unseen; a yet faker community emerges around the utopian belief of universal appropriation, shared split property of every living and inanimate thing, real or virtual. Nonetheless, these three remarks are secondary considerations in regard to the importance of the historical materialist demonstration which Sohn-Rethel offers concerning the emergence of coins and its consequences for human consciousness.

According to Sohn-Rethel, the material and historical process through which the commodity form emerges and consolidates can be analysed starting from the material act of exchange between two goods and, even more so, from the act of exchanging a good endowed with use-value for a particular object devoid of use-value – coins:

“This portentous step was taken for the first time in history about 680 BC on the Ionian side of the Aegean, in Lydia or Phrygia. The institution quickly spread, following, as well as helping, the marked commercial expansion in process at that epoch and finding imitation in the main Greek centres of maritime trade. The very introduction of coinage is a sure sign of commodity production entering upon its stage of ‘full growth’. (…) A coin (...) is a thing which conforms to the postulates of the exchange abstraction and is supposed, among other things, to consist of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature.” (Ibid.: 59)

Sohn-Rethel emphasises that the dominant feature of the commodity form is its abstract nature: it arises in exchange and exists only in human thought. In the act of commodity exchange, the materiality of a good’s use-value is, as it were, suspended in favour of the immutable and timeless exchange-value of the commodity. What this theorist calls exchange abstraction (or, in other works, commodity abstraction) thus rests on an action that is materially situated in a specific time and place, with the dual consequence of abstracting away a good’s use-value (at the same time negating its ‘linguistic’ and ‘sociological’ worth) and giving rise to an abstract form that does not exist in nature or material reality – one that therefore exists solely in human thought⁹. This reasoning allows the philosopher to conclude that the conceptual forms of thought predominant in all epochs of developed commodity production stem from relations of production determined by commodity abstraction. These are, unmistakably, the forms of philosophical thought that emerged in ancient Greece. But according to the author, this determination goes further:

“The division between intellectual labour and manual labour that prevails [in a society of commodity producers] originates in the fact that socialisation is separated from production and consumption – in other words, in the separation of nature and society. Where individuals engage in production and consumption as communal activities (...), humans’ relationship with nature forms an indissoluble unity with their relationships among themselves. Here, even the social thought of humans is a collective or cooperative process. In contrast, in commodity-producing societies, private individuals think separately from one another, albeit within identical forms of abstract synthesis. Their thought thus remains social in form, but it now constitutes purely intellectual labor, resting on a foundation that is detached from the activities of production and consumption – that is, from any form of manual labor.” (Sohn-Rethel, 2010: 66)

Let’s now attempt to connect these propositions to Garnham’s explanation, while slightly reformulating them to better grasp the nuances of these two theoretical reflections. First, Sohn-Rethel posits the hypothesis of earlier (or future) historical stages characterised by relations of production oriented exclusively towards meeting needs. In this instance, in the absence of slavery, land appropriation, or the systematisation of commodity abstraction, the social form of material production relations is collective or cooperative. There is no separation between nature and society in the sense that the material relations of production arising from nature – that is, the process of transforming nature, extracting and then distributing a material surplus (to use Garnham’s formulation) – are not ‘adorned’ by any social artifice (slavery, land appropriation, the systematisation of commodity abstraction). People produce and organise themselves in a ‘collaborative’ manner (to use more contemporary terminology) and even their social thought becomes “a collective or cooperative process”: they represent themselves without “denial and the lie” (to borrow Garnham’s phrasing)¹⁰. Conversely, in a society of commodity producers, Sohn-Rethel argues that there arises a division between intellectual labour (the production of dominant cultural forms) and other fields of production (manual labour). This separation rests on the dual level of mediation highlighted by Garnham. On the one hand, the economic social form obscures and mystifies the material relations of production (derived from what nature provides). On the other hand, dominant cultural forms enshrine a mode of thought belonging to “private individuals”, “separate from one another”, even if these forms constitute – or at the very least, contribute to – a ‘social synthesis’ and remain, ultimately, determined by commodity exchange and by the principle of identity – which we will shortly return to. Sohn-Rethel’s analysis equates them with “purely intellectual labour”, just as Garnham emphasises how the increasing division of labour results in the relative autonomy of the superstructure, through the spread of ‘texts’, those specific cultural forms of which the culture and communication industries have organised the production, yet which – as we have seen – are ever more ‘spontaneously’ produced by those formerly known as audiences or consumers; unless this process might perhaps be better understood as an implosion or dissolution of those very industries. Let’s not however lose track of the question this chapter seeks to address, that of the power of the contrary cultural forms devised and shared among Web3 players and beyond, the role they play in broader ideologisation processes, and their potential effectivity with regard to social forms of relations of production.

Men, for a thousand years before the French Revolution, did not know of any other monetary system. Books and pamphlets and statutes of the ninth to the eighteenth century are unintelligible if one does not bear in mind the distinction between money of account or imaginary money and effective or coined money. Usually the money of account was called libra, livre, lira. Men kept accounts, drew instruments of debts, sold and bought goods and securities and property rights in imaginary money, which they never saw. Coins had strange names, they poured into each country from all parts of the world, wore gold and silver and half silver dresses, were minted at home or by foreign princes. That made no difference to people who continued to talk and negotiate and keep accounts in libras. The idea got ingrained in the minds of the people that the libra, the monetary unit of account, was something invariable, however changing was the price or quotation of the effective moneys. There was something very ludicrous in this conception because princes often made use of the device of increasing the libra price of coins – which was the old name of devaluation – when they desired to repay smaller sums than those received.

Einaudi, Luigi, ‘The medieval practice of managed currency’ in The lessons of monetary experience, 1937

The Russians have brought us an odd sort of money. The baker showed us a fifty-mark bill, a kind of military issue for Germany that we’ve never seen before. He got it from a Russian officer for a mere fourteen loaves of bread. The baker couldn’t make change, but the Russian didn’t seem to mind; evidently he had a briefcase stuffed with similar bills. The baker doesn’t know what to do with the money. He would have given the Russian the bread anyway, but the man insisted on paying. Perhaps some semblance of good faith is coming back. I assume that we, too, will be given this money and that our own currency will be withdrawn and exchanged, probably for half the value.

Marta Hillers, A Woman in Berlin, 1945

¹: In a note to chapter 2, David simply writes : “I tend to agree with those who argue that ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’ should best be used to describe the inner workings of a capitalist system, and not outside it.

²: Incidentally, note here a first trace of the transhumanist desire to conquer death – which we will, of course, return to.

³: Recall: I am operating on the premise that more forms of human activity than ever before can, practically, be integrated into the process of value creation (economically exploited), directly, or indirectly through several degrees of mediation, and can therefore be theoretically analysed as labour. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination celebrating what is effectively an intensification of the abstraction of labour that Marx denounced (and produced a theoretical works in view of undoing).

⁴: Ibid., p. 54.

⁵: I find myself, for the second time in writing, apologising that I quote so long an extract, but I feel there really is no better way to go about this.

⁶: I deliberately stress in italic the term representation.

⁷: The co-elaboration of forms by human beings and fungi, fauna and flora life must be considered, as well as those resulting from association with artificial intelligence.

⁸: Moreover, it is interesting to consider how the term mεταφορά refers to the transfer of meaning from one thing to another; in modern Greek, the word is used for ‘transportation’, such as removal services or even public transport.

⁹: As is well known, according to the Marxian notion of the fetish character of the commodity, this “abstractness” of the commodity obscures from its possessors the material and historical process of commodity formation, preventing humans from recognising that a society where commodity circulation constitutes the link between all (material) things is itself an abstract society. However, while Sohn-Rethel by no means intends to deny this central proposition, his demonstration does not operate at this level of analysis.

¹⁰: In Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund, the young jouisseur and apprentice sculptor Goldmund considers that the finest form is that which nature provides, in the view that he has of water or, rather, through the water, looking at a fish; distorted yet not veiled by the will to deceive and also allowing for several interpretations (dialectical or at least pre-dialectical) – which is also what he perceives, in shock and admiration before a statue of the Virgin Mary carved by his master, Nicholas: wholly intermixed pleasure and pain. Here, there is no attempt to reduce the cultural form to one single signification, nor one lie; there can be no such attempt to reduce multiple qualities into a unique and commonly recognised quantity, which constitutes precisely the drive of ideology.